List of Additional Articles on Philosophy
- ️Ian Heath
| Home | Links to other Websites | About Me | Glossary |
In any section, the articles are best read in the order of presentation.
Some of the articles require a knowledge of my ideas on emotion, abreaction, and the process of social change. I have put a condensed version of these ideas in the article Emotion and Abreaction. And there are some short notes in the glossary. Otherwise, in-depth explanations of abreaction and catharsis, and any other aspect of psychology that I use, are on my psychology sites (see the Links page for their addresses).
Introduction - a note on influences and perspective.
Emotion and Abreaction - a summary of my ideas on emotions and their effects.
1. The Pursuit of Truth
The six articles give an overview of the thinking process and the pursuit of truth.
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How these disciplines interact ; what philosophy can be. |
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Separating fact from valuation. |
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The two aspects of intellect, and two aspects to truth ; feeling of truth. |
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How intuition functions. |
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The 'how' and the 'why' of reality ; psychological karma. |
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The usefulness of a paradigm. |
2. Relativity
The next articles feature a new interpretation of relativity. This concept has been consistently mis-understood by Western thinkers.
3. Belief
Prescriptive beliefs have two different psychological roots. Therefore I have made a distinction between morality and ethics, assigning each one a different root. I describe some limitations and consequences of moral and ethical beliefs.
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Origins and terminology ; desire for strong leaders and religious messiahs. |
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How sexuality affects ethics. |
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Practising ethics ; behaviour and character ; negotiating goodness. |
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Strengths and weaknesses of a mythic life. |
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Humanity is progressing beyond faith and power to love and justice. |
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Two paths of spirituality : religion and the life of adventure. Ancient Athens. |
4. Mind
Ideas on philosophical Idealism, or the view that reality is a mental construction. I use my understanding of the subconscious mind to produce a new formulation of traditional theory.
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The ideas of George Berkeley and Paul Brunton. |
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Inadequacies of subjective idealism: the main error is due to a faulty understanding of relativity. |
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Ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer : reality as expressions of will and struggle. |
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Static and dynamic perception ; influences of mind and will. Definition of truth. |
There are
two more
articles featuring mind and philosophical Idealism :
Synthesis
of Mind and Matter
in
section 8, and End States of
Mind in section 9.
5. Sign Systems
I bring in a few technical terms from early continental literary theory because I use them (along with my psycho-dynamic ideas) to construct a more modern theory of consciousness, or what a person is. A person is not a unitary being but a binary one. Hence I require a framework of thought that is at home with binary concepts. ( Later continental theory, or post-modernism, is not of much interest to me).
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Saussure's concept of the linguistic sign. My first disagreement with him. |
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Two axes to consciousness ; ego and karma. |
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How the individual creates values for society. |
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I add dynamic structure to Saussure's static structure ; two sign systems. |
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Language is an ideology ; projection of language and consciousness. |
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Two aspects to thought : relationships and identity, or grammar and sign. |
6. Language
Now some topics in philosophy of language. I bring together some isolated issues in recent Anglo-American moral philosophy in order to form the ‘ language loop’. And I use some simple Buddhist logic to show where Saussure went wrong in his theory of signs.
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The mind is relative, but language is self- referential. Going round in circles. |
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Social change and language change ; ethnic destruction, and pursuit of truth. |
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Steps to public language ; the language loop ; community conflict. |
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True nature of the linguistic sign. |
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Roles of the text, author and reader in modern literary theory. |
7. Handling Paradox
In the philosophy of science, quantum mechanical processes and wave-particle duality are held to be mysterious and non-causal. And so they are not thought to be amenable to intellectual description and understanding. This view arises because the way to handle paradox is not understood. In addition, there is conceptual confusion over terminology.
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Two concepts that are in opposition to each other are needed to solve a paradox. |
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The function of charge. |
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A solution to the wave-particle paradox. |
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Sometimes change is causal, and sometimes it is non-causal. |
8. Mind and Matter
I explore the cogito experience. And the nature of relativity allows me to formulate the relation of matter to mind in a new way.
9. Free Will
A deep psycho-analysis throws up disturbing limitations to some traditional views on metaphysics and free will.
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The framework in which I set my metaphysics. |
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Negative features of the impersonal will ; violence and confusion. |
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Effects of nihilism : structures of sexuality and authority. |
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Four forms of determinism ; orchestration ; boundaries and barriers. |
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More philosophical Idealism ; nihilism, oblivion, and cosmic evolution. |
Glossary plus Diagrams and Book List
Links to other Websites
About Me - profile of the author
Copyright
@2003 Ian Heath
All
Rights Reserved
The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.
Ian
Heath
London, UK
www.modern-thinker.co.uk/
e-mail address:
ianheath9.mt<at>discover-your-mind.co.uk
If you want to contact me, use the address above but replace the <at> by @
It may be a few days before I can respond to correspondence.